Jessica Chastain picked Woman Walks Ahead due to co-star Michael Greyeyes

Jessica Chastain agreed to star in Woman Walks Ahead because she wanted to work with actor Michael Greyeyes.

In the biographical drama film, the Zero Dark Thirty star plays real-life portrait artist Caroline Weldon, who travels from Brooklyn to Dakota in the 1890s to paint Sitting Bull, a leader of a Native American tribe, and becomes embroiled in the Lakota peoples' struggles over the rights to their land.

Jessica is now a box office draw, and can command top salaries for big studio movies, but she decided to work on the indie film, which only had a budget of $5 million (£3.7 million), for three reasons, including Greyeyes, who portrayed Sitting Bull.

"We made the film for not that much money," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "And to be quite honest, there were three main reasons I made it: forgotten women in history, (director) Susanna White and Michael Greyeyes.

"He's a great actor and an incredible thinker and man. His parents had been taken away from their parents to be raised in Caucasian households to get the indigenous culture out of them - that was the goal. It's devastating."

Greyeyes, who recently starred in TV show Fear the Walking Dead, admitted that the process of filming Woman Walks Ahead couldn't be described as fun because they had to battle the harsh elements.

"A Western is gruelling. The wind sometimes was extraordinary, or the heat, or the dust," he added. "Once Jessica and I had to cross a rope bridge to get to the set, and it was physically exhausting to be in that kind of sun. Jessica is very fair! We were beat."

However, the Oscar nominee didn't let the weather get her down, and the cast and crew have praised her for her drive, with co-star Sam Rockwell gushing about her "work ethic" and Susanna calling her "super-professional".

Woman Walks Ahead hits selected cinemas from 29 June (18).